Microsoft said Monday it has secured export licenses to ship Nvidia chips to the United Arab Emirates in a move that could accelerate the Gulf’s lofty AI ambitions.
The tech giant said it is the first company under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to secure such licenses from the Commerce Department and that the approval, granted in September, was based on “updated and stringent technology safeguards.”
The licenses enable the firm to ship the equivalent of 60,400 additional A100 chips, involving tech darling Nvidia’s more advanced GB300 GPUs.
“While the chips are powerful and the numbers are large, more important is their positive impact across the UAE,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “We’re using these GPUs to provide access to advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source providers, and Microsoft itself.”
Nvidia shares were up 1.97% in premarket trade at 7:41 a.m. ET.
There is a “very important” relationship between the UAE and U.S. governments that has spanned multiple administrations, Microsoft President Brad Smith told CNBC’s Dan Murphy at the ADIPEC conference in Abu Dhabi.
“We’re very grateful to the Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and the work that he has championed to enable export licenses to be made available to us,” Smith said. “That builds as well on the relationships we had with Secretary [Marco] Rubio when he was in the Senate and Democrats as well. [It] takes two parties to govern, and we keep that in mind.”
Microsoft also announced it will be increasing its investment in UAE, bringing its total contribution to $15.2 billion by the end of this decade. That includes a $1.5 billion equity investment in AI firm G42 and more than $5.5 billion in capital expenses for the expansion of Microsoft’s AI and cloud infrastructure projects in the region.
“We’re really investing in trust, and I think it’s that combination of technology, talent and trust that you’re seeing come together here in the UAE, around AI, around technology, but really the future of the whole economy,” Smith said.
— CNBC’s Dan Murphy contributed to this report.
